The ergonomic design of robot teach pendants for human-robot interaction

Abstract

This study deals with robot teach pendants at work of teaching a robot as a part of human-robot interaction. The emergency stop button on robot teach pendants was the primary device for safety of industrial robots. Recommendations for designing the emergency stop button on a typical teach pendant were proposed by the experimental evaluations. The human performance was measured by the reaction time to press the button. The variation factors were randomly combined by seven button locations and three different button sizes on a pendant. The results indicated that the fastest reaction time was obtained from 3.8 cm button size located on the left and left-down of seven positions at the pendant.